This blog adds to the three-book series, Rackets, which advocates the legalization of drugs & gambling, and prostitution. Brian Saady's work shines a light on legal "rackets," i.e. crony capitalism, and the government "racketeers" that pose as the solution for problems caused by the government. You'll see that our political and criminal justice systems are inadvertently designed to fail...like rackets.

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Trump Is In No Position To Sign A Human Trafficking Bill

My latest piece, "Congress's New Sex Trafficking Bill Won't Solve Anything," is up at The American Conservative. It's a criticism of the latest sex trafficking bill passed by Congress, FOSTA.

The bill prohibits
website owners from “promoting or facilitating prostitution of another person.” The terms “force, fraud, or coercion,”
were not mentioned, which means Congress essentially redrafted the traditional
definition of human trafficking to include prostitution between consenting
adults.

Human trafficking is actually a fairly complex subject, but
there is one simple, central caveat -- traffickers thrive upon vulnerability.
Thus, criminal penalties for prostitution leave members of the sex industry
susceptible to exploitation because they can’t go to the police for protection.

By the way, that exploitation isn’t entirely limited to
pimps and traffickers. In order to avoid being arrested, sex workers are often
extorted for free sex by those who are sworn to “protect and serve.” Last year,
the city of Oakland settled a civil lawsuit with a teen
prostitute who had sex with as many 30 local police officers. More than a few
officers had sex with her while she was underage.

Obviously, there’s no definitive way of knowing the exact
extent of this police extortion. However, there was one academic study that
provided statistics. The author Stephen Dubner and economist Steven Levitt have
published numerous unconventional studies under the banner of “Freakonomics.”
One of which found that 3% of Chicago
prostitutes’ sex acts were provided for free to area police officers to avoid
arrest.

Contrary to
popular belief, websites that allow sex workers to advertise their services
help them to avoid working for a pimp. With technology, they can selectively
screen their clients and provide the police with data in case they are
victimized. Albeit, that is the case in countries where prostitution is
decriminalized. For those reasons and more, a university-conducted survey found that nearly 80% of U.K.-based sex
workers responded that the Internet made their work conditions safer.

But, in the end,
this concept generally falls on deaf ears because we live in a time when the terms “prostitution” and
“trafficking” are falsely used interchangeably. In other words, the debate surrounding human trafficking has been
stifled by an extremely flawed belief that essentially everyone in the sex
industry is a victim of human trafficking.

It’s a small part of the current moral
panic in which over-reactions are manufactured by activist organizations. Case
in point, Walmart recently agreed to remove issues of Cosmopolitan magazine from
checkout stands after receiving pressure from the anti-pornography group, the
National Center on Sexual Exploitation.

Worst of all, this moral panic often
ignores the more relevant issue of labor trafficking. Case in point, Donald Trump has made human trafficking a major talking
point without even a hint of pushback from the press. In fact, he declared January as
Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Therefore, with that in mind, we should
evaluate the labor record of the President.

Donald Trump - Wikimedia Commons

During the 2016 campaign, an alarming story got lost in the
mix. The New York Times
and Vice profiled the human trafficking
conditions at the Trump International Golf Club in Dubai. Foreign construction
workers were lured to Dubai with contracts for certain wages. However, upon
arrival their passports were taken, they were charged exorbitant fees, paid
only a fraction of their promised wages, and essentially forced into indentured
servitude.

In his defense, Donald Trump doesn’t own the Trump
International Golf Club in Dubai. However, it’s deeply disturbing that the
person who signed the FOSTA bill earned up to $10 million licensing his name to
a property that, by all indications, was built with modern-day slave labor.